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Announcing the Zoohackathon 2017 Global Winner

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs is pleased to announce the Zoohackathon 2017 global winner, Team ODINN.

This fall, hundreds of participants competed around the world to develop conservation technology solutions at the second-annual Zoohackathon. Teams were comprised of coders, designers, project managers, and conservation specialists. Each team selected a problem statement supplied by U.S. government agencies and their partners to solve.

The Zoohackathon program promotes understanding of the problem of wildlife trafficking and enlists new partners to combat it by developing practical and innovative conservation technology solutions.

Team ODINN is a four-person team that participated in the London Zoohackathon, which was co-hosted by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and U.S. Embassy London.

Team ODINN’s prototype aims to reduce wildlife poaching and illegal trade by improving the effectiveness of field-based camera traps. Currently, wildlife camera traps capture countless images of all kinds of wildlife, limiting their utility for rangers. Team ODINN’s technology acts as an image filter that flags humans and endangered wildlife from the multitude of images, thus enabling rangers to rapidly identify poaching sites. The prototype reduces the number of images that the rangers must examine by 98 percent and can be retro-fitted to existing camera traps, eliminating the need for additional equipment.